A patchwork of metal roofing and tarps blocks the high sun over the famous open-air market, but it might as well be tissue paper vaporized by a combination of cooking steam, grill smoke and a humid 98 degrees. Relief is sporadic, coming from a small electric fan or a breeze kicked up from the busy street outside.
No matter. In Thailand, a little swelter never stands in the way of snacking. And the winding walkways through the Chatuchak weekend market provide rows of food stalls from which to graze.
Any visitor can enjoy the leisurely and lavish service of a traditional Thai restaurant feast, complete with music and dancers in bright silk. But plenty of other meals are served up faster than a drive-through burger. Vendors line the streets in every town, hawking inexpensive food as though every day were a county fair. The Thai people love to eat, even just standing in front of a mobile noodle cart or sitting down in a storefront for a quick dish of roast pork and rice.
Many Americans are familiar with Thailand only through the countless casual restaurants in the U.S. that have popularized pad Thai noodles and chicken satay with peanut sauce. But Chicago chef Arun Sampanthavivat (pronounced sam-pan-TA-wee-wat), of Aruns restaurant on the Northwest Side, recently showed a group of food enthusiasts the eye-popping variety of real Thai food.
Arun has made a name for himself by introducing traditional Thai food in an upscale setting; he is a finalist again this year for the best chef in the Midwest award from the James Beard Foundation, to be announced May 3 in New York.
When he came to Chicago to study almost 20 years ago, Arun was depressed by the food. “Meat loaf!,” he said, remembering. “I didn’t eat beef. I still don’t. I would get ingredients at the Hyde Park Co-op and make chicken and rice with herbs, on a hot plate in my dormitory room.”
But with the food in Thailand, Arun was in his element. And by leading chefs, food writers and loyal diners through Bangkok and Chiang Mai, he had the chance to introduce the cuisine from the street level up.
A little bit of this …
“Thai food must have balance,” he said while waiting for some spicy sausages to come off the grill at one cart. “It is not bland. You have to have a little hot, some sweetness, even a little sour taste.”
That’s evident upon reading any Thai cookbook. Whether an appetizer, main course, soup or salad, a dish’s foundation lies in a combination of crushed peppers or hot curry paste, pungent and salty fish sauce, a bit of sugar and a refreshing squeeze of lime or other citrus flavor. Yet the cuisine varies according to the availability of pork and chicken or the abundance of fish and shellfish, from crabs and giant shrimp to grouper and little flying fish that can be fried and eaten whole, bones and all.
Other dishes range from crunchy salads, sprightly with vinegar and lime, to the smooth, smoky flavors of slow-cooked curries.
Because of the emphasis on powerful flavor, most vendors supply a Thai-style condiment tray, including red pepper or chili paste, sugar and a sweet-and-sour sauce.
Arun, away from the demands of running his elegant restaurant, reveled in the dine-and-dash aspect of the street. In a passageway lined with shops selling car parts, shoes and plastic toys, a noodle cart caught his eye. A woman working over a flat, wide griddle heated to smoking by a gas flame deftly scrambled together eggs and stir-fried noodles with squid and handed over the finished dish on a flowered china plate.
“This is good, this is good, have some,” he urged, sharing the steaming dish, which cost about 50 cents. Reaching with chopsticks and forks to mix in more seasoning, he said, “I’m always hungry here. In the States, I only eat one meal a day.”
The quick meal was al fresco dining, Bangkok-style: wobbly plastic seats on the sidewalk, where our table formed a tiny breakwater in the constant flow of foot traffic and zipping motorbikes lent their exhaust to the atmosphere. The noodles were gone in minutes and we moved on, looking for equally appealing fare, such as skewered grilled sausages, garlic-chive pancakes and crab meat dumplings.
That’s one of the great charms of Thai food: It is plentiful and cheap. But it also manages to be a great sensory experience, unlike fast food in the West. From the humblest of cooking stations (usually a metal cart shaded with an umbrella and lighted at night by a hanging naked bulb or fluorescent light rod), a hungry visitor can feast as though moving along a banquet line.
Table on the water
The food might literally cruise by, as at one floating market outside Bangkok, where women in sarongs and wide-brimmed hats sell fresh fruit, vegetables and cooked food out of long, open boats plying the canals. Right there, on the water, one woman deep-fried banana fritters in a wok over a gas grill; another cooked miniature pancakes of coconut and sticky rice on a griddle.
Some vendors have several specialties, such as fish-ball soup and curried catfish. Others sell one thing only: maybe a dish of boiled chicken, sliced and served with rice; steamed tapioca dumplings filled with minced pork and peanuts; or a peeled coconut, pierced with a straw for drinking the clear, sweet juice inside. Everything is assembled quickly and eaten on the spot by taxi drivers, office workers and housewives, or taken home for a no-cook meal, a blessing in the constant hot weather.
Unexpected sources of nourishment included a simple hot-and-sour ham hock soup and fried chicken wings offered to the group by Buddhist nuns living near a temple.
“Look how kind they are,” Arun said of the women, with their shaved heads and white cotton sarongs and shirts. Other nuns prepared tofu and vegetables for the monks, making sure the food was nicely peeled and presented.
That’s a hallmark of Thai cuisine. For all the grab-and-go nature of everyday food, preparation is nuanced and complex.
Curries, fresh herbs and salty seasonings keep most of the food from being plain, and most every ingredient is minced, folded, pasted, pounded, wrapped and rolled. Fresh fruit, such as the ubiquitous mango or red-fleshed papaya, is seldom served without being carved into decorative leaf or diamond patterns.
In their book “Simply Thai Cooking,” authors Wandee Young and Byron Ayanoglu write about the “richly colored and simply garnished” food in a land where “every plate is an edible work of art.” The flourishes are basic, from sprigs of cilantro and crushed salty peanuts to hard-cooked chicken or duck eggs, the yolks an astonishing and vibrant orange. The colors-sunny yolks, red peppers, green herbs, creamy noodles, brown crisped duck skin-can paint a beautiful picture in just one dish.
A stand-alone cuisine
Although Thai food certainly retains some influences of China to the north, Vietnam to the east and Malaysia to the south, its carefully constructed cuisine is its own.
“I thought I knew how to cook Thai food until I came here,” said Ronald Pietruszka, a Chicagoan who now is executive chef at the luxury Regent resort near the northern city of Chiang Mai. “When I had it in the States, the impression of the food was that it’s either spicy or sweet. Now I realize you can have it all in one dish-sweet, sour, spicy, crunchy, crisp and smooth.”
One example is a regional Chiang Mai specialty, kaow soy kai, a curried noodle soup with chicken. As served at the resort or at an outdoor restaurant in town, the soup is a spectacular meal of diced poached chicken, coconut milk and curry with subtle seasonings of fish sauce and sugar. Soft-cooked noodles and fried egg noodle garnishes give texture, while lime juice and cilantro add freshness.
Pad Thai is popular as well, naturally. The noodles tangled with shrimp and chicken, sweetened with tamarind and crunchy with bean sprouts, are the soul of comfort food.Other recipes take some getting used to. At one lunch in Chiang Mai, people who didn’t closely read the sign over a pot of stewed mixed greens and white seedlike pods, helped themselves to ant egg soup. Durian, a beloved fruit with a spiny skin like a porcupine, has a creamy, custard-flavored interior of beautiful flesh that resembles lobes of foie gras. But it’s the smell of the durian-sort of an eau de gym socks-that keeps the fruit an acquired taste and banned as carry-on luggage on long flights.
But other foods easily appeal to American palates, such as the curries, fragrant with herbs and lighted from within by searing little peppers. They are a part of formal meals and picnics; even breakfast is often a mild fish curry with rice noodles. And in the same way that locally grown produce and native fish help connect the eater to the landscape, eating fiery curries helps one melt into the atmosphere, a sultry climate of peppers and humidity that bastes everything.
It felt that way one afternoon after a drive to a little town outside Bangkok and a walk up two flights of stairs to a restaurant terrace overlooking the river.
Fishing boats and a lone windsurfer took advantage of a good breeze, which, along with endless bottles of Singha beer and room-temperature Pepsi, cooled down hot faces. It was time to eat. Arun ordered for the group, and out came platters of grilled prawns, fried whole catfish with sweet chili sauce, crab fried rice and chicken with basil. Thai pop music played over a loudspeaker. Plates were passed, metal serving spoons clattered on the tabletop, the food kept coming, and everything was enjoyed with the gentle delirium that characterized so many of our meals.
Then it was time to go. It was a few more miles back to Bangkok, time
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See recipes and sources for ingredients on Page 2.
